Community development quota program: partners in profit.

• Author: Gay, Joel
• Position: Fishery quota program

America's first fishery quota program, at work in southwest Alaska, could impact the entire commercial fishing industry.

A radical new federal program is dramatically changing the Bering Sea fishing industry and at the same time creating jobs and opportunity in coastal Alaska Native villages -- without costing taxpayers a dime.

The idea behind community development quotas, or CDQs, is relatively simple: Give the villages a percentage of the annual harvest of pollock, cod and other commercial species; allow the local residents to catch the fish themselves or sell their quota to existing businesses; and require the villagers to spend their new-found profits on creating long-term jobs in their communities.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council approved the program last year for the biggest fishery of them all, Bering Sea pollock. Fishing began in December. So far, observers say, it's going as planned. In one month, $350,000 in wages was paid to local residents, and $19 million worth of fish was caught on behalf of rural Alaska villages.

"They've become players in the game," says Donna Parker, a fisheries specialist in the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development. "What they did in one month was very impressive. That's what we were hoping for."

But while CDQs are already having a profound effect on residents of the Bering Sea coast, they could also transform the North Pacific fishing industry, and perhaps the national industry, too. The program is considered a test case for a complete overhaul of the biggest, most industrialized fisheries, and it may force a look at the idea of charging fishermen for the resources they take from federal waters.

Splitting Bottomfish Bonanza

Bering Sea Coast residents have long argued that they should share the wealth of the region. There is a precedent, they say, pointing to oil development on the nation's outer continental shelf communities. Halibut was the first species proposed for a separate allocation. But as the trawl fisheries of pollock and Pacific cod exploded in the 1980s, the billion-dollar bottomfish boom became the focus of attention.

Congress failed to create CDQs when it reauthorized the Magnuson Act in 1990, so the North Pacific council tacked CDQs onto its highly controversial "inshore-offshore" plan. That program was widely perceived as splitting the Bering Sea pollock resource two ways, between shore-based processing plants and the factory trawler fleet. In fact, it was a...